


Soggy Band-Aids

by orphan_account



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: College AU, Drinking, M/M, fic prompt, i'm probably in love with Sugawara Koushi, what am i doing idek
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-26 13:40:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1690322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The day had started fine enough, save for the unwelcomed awakening of construction equipment down the block at five in the morning and the sonorous whine of his roommate’s snoring, and while Daichi isn’t quick to a raging temper, he’s definitely not <i>immune</i> and <i>wow</i>, there is a reason Kuroo sleeps with his pillows stuffed against his ears. He’s awake too-early and he’s run out of pocket-money and there’s a light rain pattering at and through the warped frame of the room’s only window. Basically, he’s decided <i>fuck it</i>, he’s going to sleep in and hope the afternoon clears up.<br/>(<i>DaiSuga "called the wrong number while drunk" au tumblr prompt.</i>)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soggy Band-Aids

Sawamura Daichi, eighteen, meets Sugawara Koushi, also eighteen, in a cripplingly embarrassing way.

The day had started fine enough, save for the unwelcomed awakening of construction equipment down the block at five in the morning and the whine of his roommate’s snoring, and while Daichi isn’t quick to a raging temper, he’s definitely not _immune_ and _wow_ , there is a reason Kuroo sleeps with his pillows stuffed against his ears. He’s awake too-early and he’s run out of pocket-money and there’s a light rain pattering at and through the warped frame of the room’s only window. Basically, he’s decided _fuck it_ , he’s going to sleep in and hope the afternoon clears up.

Except Kuroo’s alarm goes off and the bed-head wonder jumps from sleep like it’s nothing and reminds Daichi, patting helplessly at his hair, that _hey_ , _isn’t there a lab in 101 today_ and _Sawamura_ , _you haven’t missed class all quarter_ and _can’t you not make it up?_ He drags himself from the unwashed tangle of his blankets and staggers across a tile floor soft with weeks of dust and discarded clothes to the closet, sighs, and steps on the jagged end of a broken cup.

“Oh, shit,” Kuroo says, frozen in the act of tugging on his worn and faded high-tops. “I forgot to clean that up. Whoops.”

“ _Whoops_?” he repeats, incredulous, bleeding profusely from his left heel. Drops of blood _plip_ onto the scuffed and unclean tile, drowning small balls of gray dust in red as Daichi squeezes the cut.

“Do we have any Band-Aids?” Kuroo tugs a broken-toothed comb through his hair while rifling through an overflowing cardboard box under his bed. “I know my mom sent me some-“

“Fuck you,” Daichi says, with only very weary, very halfhearted animosity. He catches the unopened box Kuroo tosses and presses a handful of tissues against his foot, because if there’s one thing they have an abundance of, it’s tissues, for some unfathomable reason.

“No thanks,” Kuroo says, unenthusiastic. He leans up against the window, fogging up the glass with his breath, and adds a very sincere: “Today’s gonna be really fuckin’ awful.”

Daichi lines the inside of his sock with a tissue and winces when he stands. “No kidding.”

                He really had _no_ idea.

…

“I’m passing back the last exam.”

Daichi eyes Kuroo with an accustomed lack of sympathy when he groans and collapses face-first onto the table. The professor, sensing the movement from the corner of his vision, smiles unpleasantly. In a lecture hall of nearly a hundred students, not a single person escapes a terrified shudder.

“You couldn’t have done that badly,” he says, trying to prod the still-whining Kuroo from his stupor.

“mngfff.”

“You’re good at math.”

“mnnnnnngfth.”

“I take it back. You’re an actual infant, congratulations.”

One of the TAs climbs the stairs to their row, brandishing her stack of exam booklets like a weapon of mass destruction. Daichi watches with dead eyes as she rattles off names and passes the tests back to the paling freshmen. When the kid in front of him opens his, he slumps forward and assumes the same defeated slouch currently employed by Kuroo. In other words, all signs point south.

Daichi’s name is called and he’s handed the test’s pink and white packet. Dread settles low in his stomach as he flips the first page and is immediately met with a wall of red ink. With each problem, the messy scrawl of the professor’s handwriting grows more and more prolific, until he reaches the very last set and finds an uncharacteristically neat:

_All wrong. Substituted wrong values here, here, and here. Incorrect memorization of the frictional coefficient for hiduminium alloy. Simple mistakes. Try harder._

“Oh-ho- _ho_.” Kuroo’s suddenly alive and alert and gripping the edges of his test. His eyes sparkle in some sort of shocked awe. “Look at all this red!”

“You’re not supposed to be proud of it,” Daichi mutters, still distracted by the abundant spread of pen on his own papers. “I can’t believe I missed all of these.”

“Hmm.” By now, the entire class has received results. The professor sits in his swivel chair and leans back, assessing the room with smug and glittering eyes. Kuroo, eying the dangerous tilt of said chair, drags the end of his hum up into a sharp, well-timed: “What an a _sshole_.”

Daichi ignores him outwardly, but can only concur wretchedly as he, too, lowers himself to the table’s cool and uncompromising surface.

 _How awful_ , he thinks. _I even studied_.

…

He and Kuroo part ways after the nine a.m. release of their class, sticking to their usual pattern even as the skies darken and the rain comes down in heavier sheets. Daichi wishes miserably for an umbrella as he wades his way through deepening puddles all the way across campus. The autumn’s wet weather grinds at him in the weary, weathered way it tends to possess.

By lunchtime, he’s afraid that the cut on the bottom of his foot is infected by the bog of water his shoe had gathered. It throbs painfully as he sits at a table full of other engineering majors in the cafeteria, spooning bitter soup into his mouth and trying to keep his supplements to the conversation positive. It’s harder than he wish it were. Outside, the day’s storms have grown to torrential downpours, drumming ceaselessly on the building’s metal roof, the buzz of it like static on a poorly tuned radio.

By dinnertime, he’s certain that he’d just lived through the worst twelve hours of his life. Daichi meets a group of friends for dinner at the cafeteria, where he eats a slightly less bitter meal and stares listlessly through the falling rain. The atmosphere is dead and, without a doubt, Daichi’s inner state reflects it well.

“Hey,” Kuroo says with an impressive degree of brightness when he enters the room later that evening. Daichi looks up from a textbook and levels him his most unimpressed look. “Yeah, see, I’ve got something to fix that.” He smiles his best shit-eating grin and pulls his bag from his shoulders, snickering as the unmistakable clank of glass catches Daichi’s attention.

“Good job,” he says, the first piece of earnest praise he’s given anyone since that morning. Kuroo flashes him a quick thumbs-up and unzips his bag, tosses a bottle of a dark liquid onto Daichi’s bed, and collapses onto his own.

“To the end of a shitty day,” Kuroo toasts before tipping his bottle up and choking.

Daichi ignores him and goes straight to it, ignoring the burn of it coarse down his throat, still safe in the thought that it really was the end.

…

“’eyy, Sawamura, you—should ‘rder takeout.” Kuroo’s hanging backwards off the back of his bed and patting his empty stomach, the arrhythmic pattern not irritating his roommate as much as it normally would have.

“Mmf.” Daichi idly reaches for his cell phone in the darkness; they hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights as the sun set. By this time of the year and with Kuroo as a roommate, he’s already memorized their favorite restaurant’s number, so he directly begins to dial. Unfortunately, his fingers aren’t as agile as they ought to be, and he ends up smashing a few undesirable keys. Despite his obvious error, Daichi presses call and slouches back into his pillows.

The line flattens from its ringing with a click.

“ _Hello_?”

“Hi.” Daichi lowers the phone and turns to face Kuroo. “Whaddya want?”

Kuroo recites his order with remarkable accuracy. Daichi falls short of his accomplishment and trails off mid-sentence, forgetting the specific side he’d _really_ been craving.

“ _I’m sorry, who is this_?”

Daichi blinks, realizing that he’s reached the wrong number. He obediently provides his name and asks a bewildered: “Who’re you?”

“ _Sugawara Koushi_ ,” the voice on the other end says. The connection crinkles for a second with as the person readjusts his phone. “ _I think you have the wrong number_.” There’s the smallest curve to his voice— _he’s smiling_ , Daichi realizes, and feels as though he’s been hit by a truck. An amused, smooth-voiced truck, who sounded surprisingly familiar.

“I—“ Daichi flounders, wanting to keep the mysterious and soothing voice on the other end talking. “My Band-Aid is soggy.”

“ _What_?”

“Because my roommate dropped a cup,” Daichi explains (poorly). His eyes wander across the smooth-white stretch of the room’s ceiling, then flick down to the phone he’s pressed uncomfortably tight against his ear.

“ _All right_ ,” Sugawara says, the same smiled-twist to his words as before. Daichi listens intently and makes another discovery: he has a rural accent. “ _I’m going to hang up now. Good luck with your, uh, Band-Aid_.”

“Wait-“ But it’s too late and he’s already ended the call. Daichi sits for a very still span of minutes and stares at the number he’d mistakenly called, wondering if he’d inadvertently stumbled onto an angel.

“Food?” Kuroo asks, trying to fumble his way to a proper sitting position on his bed. In the midnight darkness, Daichi can just pick out the flattened top of Kuroo’s hair.

“…no.” Daichi locks his phone, after a first awkward attempt, and stuffs his face into a pillow.

“Why not?”

“Soggy Band-Aids,” Daichi supplies, already drifting off.

“Huh?” But he’s fallen asleep, leaving Kuroo to the night’s impersonal pause.

…

The next day, morning comes like a sledgehammer, bestowing upon the two teenagers headaches and cotton-ball tongues. Kuroo’s alarm shakes the very bone of Daichi’s skull, the noise stabbing like knives into the swollen, sensitive pulse of his headache.

“That was a bad idea,” Kuroo moans, and Daichi’s unsure whether he means the drinking or the alarm, but can agree wholeheartedly to either. Eventually, Daichi’s able to half-fall, half-climb out of bed and trek across the room. Every step agitates his foot, but this time, at least, he doesn’t step on any broken dishware.  

“Don’t you have class in an hour?” he rasps, wincing at the strangled roughness of his voice.

“Mnnnnnnnnnnnfff.” Kuroo buries himself in his twin pillows.

“I’m going,” Daichi mutters, heading to the floor’s restroom. Kuroo only whines again in response.

…

He’s three quarters of the way through an in-class discussion when Daichi finally recognizes the voice on the other end of the call the night before. A very kind voice, familiar through a required speech class. A very kind voice, belonging to the light-haired boy sitting across from him in the circle of chairs. A very kind voice, who he had spoken to while _inebriated_. Daichi’s stomach drops to his knees.

As if sensing his attention, Sugawara turns his head and makes eye contact. Daichi can only stare, gradually turning red at the ears, while the owner of The Voice returns his stare perplexedly. He jerks his head to the side, painfully aware of Sugawara’s scrutiny as he feigns attention toward the current speaker.

Daichi hurriedly gathers his things after the professor releases them, hoping to make a quick break for the door. Fate intervenes—although this time arguably in Daichi’s favor—when Sugawara steps around him to retrieve his own bag, which sits just next to Daichi’s. They stand in an incredibly awkward silence, Daichi’s hands unsteady as he zips his bag, Sugawara sneaking secretive glances from beneath his eyelashes. Finally, Daichi slings his backpack over a shoulder and backs away, nodding shortly to the object of his single-night pining.

Just as he’s reached the wide, double doors, Sugawara calls: “How is the Band-Aid today?” A barely-controlled laugh distorts his voice, creating a low-to-high lilt.

Daichi stiffens instantly and pales. He clears his voice, attempting normalcy, and turns around with a plaintive “I’m _so_ sorry.”

Sugawara laughs outright and starts toward the exit. As he comes up next to Daichi, he leans against one of the doors, opening it just a little. “Sawamura, right? I’m Sugawara. And it’s fine,” he says, readjusting the strap of his messenger bag over his shoulder. Daichi notices the mole below his eye and the soft gleam of his gray-light hair and swallows. “Happens to everyone.”

“Somehow, I don’t think so,” Daichi says sheepishly. He leans against the other door, unconsciously mirroring Sugawara’s position. A thought occurs to him. “How did you, uh, know it was me?” He hunches his shoulders, still amazingly embarrassed. 

“Mmm,” Sugawara hums, tapping at his bag. He turns a small, closed-mouth smile to Daichi. His eyes are sharp with a mischievous aptitude. “I remember names well.”

Daichi nods. Sugawara points to his foot.

“And you’re limping.”

Daichi bobs his head again, except this time, it’s penitent and filled with shame.

“I’m really sorry,” he repeats, even now living through the same awful, mortifying hell.

“I told you,” Sugawara says, and pushes his door open. “It’s fine.”

“Still.” Daichi follows him out and into the hallway, stuffing his hands into the pocket of his hoodie. “It’s embarrassing.”

Sugawara’s mouth twitches at its edges, a quick flash, before he opens it to say, in a clear and nearly-confident voice: “Make it up with a coffee?”

Daichi turns, surprised, and finds only genuine curiosity on the other’s face. He shrugs. “I’d love to,” he says, an apology crawling into his words. “But I have classes all this afternoon.”

“Oh.” They emerge from the school building, blinking in the bright light of a clear sky. Daichi doesn’t miss the way the sunlight catches Sugawara’s pale eyes, illuminating his irises mossy-brown and green-gold for a short second. “Well, I’ll call you about it.”

Daichi cuts a quick glance at him, his eyebrows furrowing in momentary confusion.

“I already have your number,” Sugawara teases, then laughs. Daichi smiles instantly in response and scratches the back of his neck, admiring the profile of Sugawara’s face before looking away. They pass under a cluster of yellow-leaved trees, dodging other rushing students, unhurrying despite the pull of the crowd.

“That’s true,” he says. He hitches a thumb in the direction of his next class. “I’m going this way. Um, call me?”

“Of course,” Sugawara calls, waving shortly and walking in the opposite direction. “See you around.”     

As he settles into a lecture on tensility, Daichi can’t help but to grin. Kuroo, slouched and bedraggled, double-takes as he sits down beside him.

“Do I want to know why you’re happy?” he asks, rubbing his forehead sourly.

Daichi pauses and thinks. “Probably not.”

Kuroo sighs and rests his head on his arms. “Wake me up when it’s over.”

“You really shouldn’t sleep during class,” he chastises, taking his cell out from his bag. Daichi thumbs through his recent calls list and settles on the (surely magic) set of numbers that belong to Sugawara. He saves the contact and snaps the phone shut with an alacrity usually reserved for sports.  

**Author's Note:**

> jazz hands as i walk away  
> daisuga is really great, obvs.  
> still editing and revising. originally posted on my tumblr.  
> i'm writing a second part buT I'M MAKING NO PROMISES ON THE QUALITY sobs.


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